Two weeks ago the latest and greatest in VMware’s SDDC came out: VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 3.7.
Apart from including the current security patches (e.g. ESXi 6.7 EP 06 / build number 11675023) a couple of new automation features have been added, as you can see in the release notes.
Also the cloud builder for setting up greenfield Cloud Foundation and VMware Validated Design deployments have been merged. As you can see in my tweet from a while back this used to be to separate OVA files.
VCF 3.7 can be installed as a new deployment or upgraded from the previous version (3.5.1), which is what I did to a dark site I am maintaining.
The process is the same as in my previous posts:
After downloading the bundle files (around 21 GB) on a PC with internet access and importing those into the SDDC manager you can trigger the first phase of the update process, which is updating the SDDC manager itself:
This took less than 22 minutes on current Dell EMC hardware:
The new build numbers are 12695026 / 12695044 (UI).
After triggering the next update phase the vCenter and PSC instances are bumped from build number 10244745 to 11726888, which is the most current security update available:
The last step is upgrading the ESXi hosts to build number 11675023 which was released on 01/17/2019. Only recently (03/28/2019) a more current security patch was released, which will presumably be included in one of the future VCF upgrades.
Having all VCF 3.7 patches installed is confirmed by the displayed text “There is no update available”.
Nice information and so informative. Thank you!